Brazil’s electoral court called it at 9:12 PM Brasília time. With 99.76 percent of sections counted, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took 51.75 percent — 64,066,539 votes — to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.25 percent, 59,724,015. A margin of 4.3 million. A fourth term. And, as Zev put it from the desk Sunday night, the end of “the most sustained campaign a US administration has ever run to pick Brazil’s president.”
Three weeks ago this was Flávio’s to lose. He beat Lula in the first round on October 4 by 2.2 million votes. Trump called it “a very tight but great victory.” Prediction markets had him at 78 percent as polls opened Sunday morning. The polls said 51–49. The polls were right.
Polls were due to close at 4 PM Eastern. At 4:11, Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ordered every station in the country to stay open two more hours after both campaigns asked for time — Lula’s coalition citing bus service cut in São Paulo and Salvador, Flávio’s citing weather. The electoral court froze the count at 4:20 with a quarter of one percent in. It restarted at six.
Lula led the first boxes. Flávio passed him at about 15 percent counted and held the lead through 45. Then the South and Southeast — the regions Flávio was supposed to own — came in, and Lula went from nothing to two million ahead. “Squeaked away with quite a resounding victory,” Zev said on air. “I say squeak and resounding in the same sentence. It doesn’t always fit.”
Turnout was 80.79 percent of 158.7 million registered voters.
Reuters reported Saturday, on ten current and former US officials, that Trump’s team spent eighteen months working to return the Bolsonaros to power: Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the justice who convicted Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup; visas revoked for the justices who sat with him; tariffs on Brazilian goods with the father’s prosecution named as the reason; a terrorist designation for Brazil’s gangs announced the day after Flávio met Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in May. Eduardo Bolsonaro worked the State Department from Washington.
Lula told voters for months that Washington was trying to pick their president. Zev’s read Sunday night went further: that the Trump administration’s hand showed in the first round, and that the second round was the one Brazil got to decide for itself. “Trump will try and make it seem like he had nothing to do with all of this,” he said. “He was caught in the cookie jar.”
Flávio had promised amnesty for his father, who is serving 27 years. He admitted taking about $12 million from banker Daniel Vorcaro to fund a film about him and is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. Brazil read all of that and still gave him 48 percent. Not a landslide. A decision.
Aleksandar Vučić conceded Serbia’s parliamentary election ninety minutes after polls closed in Belgrade — fourteen years of one-man rule, gone to a leaderless Students’ List with no politicians on it. By his own party’s projection the students take 135 to 140 of 250 seats to his 105, roughly 2.2 million votes to 1.7 million, on turnout near 70 percent — the highest since Milošević fell in 2000. He blamed independent media, unnamed European governments and “an American deep state.” Putin had endorsed him.
The movement began under a concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station that collapsed in November 2024 and killed sixteen people. Dijana Hrka, who lost her son there, told N1 from the Belgrade crowd: “I have been waiting for this moment for two years.”
And in Venezuela, María Corina Machado slipped back into the country Sunday after a year outside it — the story Narativ led with at 1:30 PM, before Brazil took the night.
Orbán fell in April after sixteen years. Vučić fell Sunday after fourteen. Brazil kept Trump’s man out. Three ballots in one year on the same model — Putin’s endorsement, Trump’s friendship, the courts and the broadcaster in one set of hands — and the model lost all three.
Israel votes next. The United States votes November 3. Zev’s note to the chat as the Brazil numbers settled: the tactic that showed up in São Paulo Sunday — the buses that didn’t run — travels. “Plan extra hours when you go to the polls on the 3rd.”
Trump phoned Lula before the vote and wished him luck. His State Department declined, in writing, to say it would respect the result. Now it has one.
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